


The Ninth Indivisible

by yhlee (etothey)



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 23:48:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21667645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee
Summary: Harrow and Gideon make a narrow escape from Canaan House after a confession gone wrong.  AU from the pool scene.Thanks to my betas: Isis and Kate Nepveu.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 16
Kudos: 136
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Ninth Indivisible

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SugarFey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SugarFey/gifts).



There was no thanergy in space, usually, and this posed a problem. Not for Gideon exactly, because she couldn't tell where death-juice lurked or puddled or whatever the hell it did. But it did for Harrow, whose lamentably bad idea this lamentably bad escape had been.

Their predicament had started with Harrow's confession, specifically the part beginning (and this tickled Gideon's funny bone by pure spinal reflex) _"Of course I wouldn't be worth it"_ and ending _"I am a war crime."_ Gideon had been so enraptured by this disclosure that it had almost distracted her from the bird-wing protrusion of Harrow's collarbones leading down to her shallow chest.

Gideon scrabbled for something to say to this. Probably not _"You could have told me instead of being a dick my entire childhood"_ because that would have killed the mood. Also probably not _"You're almost hot when you wash off all that paint,"_ which would have been mood-killing in a completely different direction. And besides, given Harrow's haggard face, not really true. Not that Gideon held the truth in particular esteem.

The fevered wheeling of her brain was for naught, for their _very private_ confessional was interrupted by Silas fucking Octakiseron. He glowered at them from the doorway where he had smothered the senses of the guardian skeletons that Harrow had summoned with some gloom-ridden necromancy of his own, his cavalier Colum in tow. "I had thought that the heresies of the Ninth had a limit, however foul and distant," he said. "I see now that I was wrong."

"Excuse me, aren't you supposed to knock?" Gideon demanded. At the same time she lunged out of the water--she hoped Harrow appreciated this special edition saltwater-drenched view of her backside--and went for her rapier and gauntlet. She was never ever going to let the piddling customs of the cavaliers separate her from her beloved two-hander again.

Silas was ready for her, because of course he was. In his shadow hulked his nephew, gone gray and going grayer. Gideon considered that people who practiced soul siphoning should maybe shut up about other Houses' nasty habits. Her first rapier thrust slowed short of the target, as though she swam through a completely different entropic field, one that leached the strength from her muscles. Some unchancy Eighth defense, no doubt.

"Don't waste your time on them, _run_!" Harrow screamed. She exploded out of the water in a cascade of salt droplets; light shattered through them in miniature murky rainbows. Skeletons swarmed uncle and nephew, decelerating as dramatically as Gideon had as they neared the Eighth.

For once in her life, Gideon obeyed. They'd been through too much in this mazy house of horrors for her to do anything else. Besides, Harrow hadn't had a chance to finish her confession and Gideon bet that she'd just been getting to the really juicy stuff. She caught up Harrow's hand and nearly yanked her off her feet as they sprinted out of the room with its pool, skeletons boiling up out of outflung bone nubs and particles behind them to barricade the Eighth necromancer and cavalier within.

"Fantastic," Gideon panted, some three left turns, one staircase, and uncounted hallways later, "what now, O ghastly necromantic one?"

 _"Griddle."_ Harrow chewed her lower lip, thinking furiously. "We have to get off-planet. Because the very first thing Octakiseron is going to do is tell everyone else what he overheard. And unless you want to kill him to keep him quiet"--Gideon shook her head--"our only hope is escape. We're out of the running." Her voice shook with frustration.

"Um," Gideon said. "No shuttles, remember?"

"There's a way, if, if, _if_." Harrow thought some more. "Come with me." She looked more naked without her robes, despite the sodden trousers and shirt, than if she'd stripped down to skin. On any other occasion Gideon would have been struck speechless by the sudden revelation that her necromancer had a faint resemblance to someone pretty, pointy chin and all.

Gideon ordinarily had a good sense of direction, but their headlong flight had scrambled it. She told herself that Harrow's unaccustomed vulnerability had nothing to do with it. Sure, they had unfinished business, but they had to survive before they could deal with all the rest.

"You're overreacting," Gideon said in between pants as she followed Harrow toward the doors of Canaan House, specifically the landing platforms where Gideon had once seen the shuttles swan-diving into the ocean, many dreary nights ago. "Everyone knows Silas is a prick. Mr. Sex Pal, at least, wouldn't dismiss us out of hand."

"Palamedes Sextus," said her necromancer through gritted teeth, "has a sense of necromantic propriety just as strict as Octakiseron's, although they disagree over trifles. We cannot rely on him or his cavalier as allies. Are you with me or not, Gideon?"

Gideon, impressed that Harrow had used her name, swallowed the automatic rejoinder.

Skeletons forced the moldering doors open. The salt wind whipped Harrow's short-cropped hair about her face; her pale visage might have been manufactured of bone. "I can't do this alone," she added. This time Gideon fancied that her teeth were slightly less gritted.

"What the hell," Gideon said. And then, as she slowly twigged to Harrow's plans, "You're not going to--"

"The mysterious murderer," Harrow said, the faint blush of blood sweat breaking out over her brow, "is not the only one who can raise bone constructs."

Gideon pondered this for a moment. Maybe it wouldn't work? Maybe Harrowhark Nonagesimus, necromancer of an entire generation of the Ninth, had reached the limits of her power. Maybe salt water drained her abilities, or merely reminded her how much she hated the pale meat of the things that swam below. (Actually, Gideon had no idea how Harrow felt about the meat.)

Then, with a roar, tentacles formed of kelp-laced bone, of barnacle-encrusted enamel, exploded up through the water's mirror-surface, shattering it so comprehensively that Gideon thought it might never repair itself. Within their coils they bore a shuttle, or the caved-in wreck of one.

"That doesn't look spaceworthy," Gideon said, forgetting tact. "Also, that commotion will have attracted everyone in Canaan House."

"The shuttle can be fixed up," Harrow said, "with the secrets of regenerating bone, and more besides. I am not the foremost necromancer of my age for nothing."

Gideon secretly found this impressive, but would never have admitted it, even if they were almost friends now. "So that stuff is basically, like, duct tape, except for bones?" she asked. "Cool."

"Gideon"--there it came again, _her name_ in Harrow's mouth--"shut up and get in the shuttle."

Gideon had grave reservations about getting in a shuttle that had just had a vacation at the bottom of some godforsaken sea, but okay, Harrow was calling the shots. The bone tentacles set the shuttle down, none too gently, on the platform. Water continued to drain out of it. The entry hatch had broken clean off.

"They're coming," Gideon warned. She heard the CLANG CLANG CLANG of skeletal feet pounding against Canaan House's overburdened floors.

Harrow cast one last despairing look back at Canaan House, then dragged Gideon into the shuttle. The smell of rotting seaweed and diseased barnacles was everywhere, a suppurating presence. Harrow flung bone fragments, and they grew up over the shuttle's entire interior, sheathing it in lambent bone. Or it was lambent, anyway, in the last moment before darkness entombed them both.

Gideon, no stranger to darkness, nevertheless bit down on a yelp.

"If I've calculated correctly," Harrow said, "and I have, then the tentacles will launch us with a trajectory that--" The rest of her monologue trailed off into incomprehensible orbital mechanics bullshit. One thing Gideon had always appreciated about her dirty magazines was that they handwaved incomprehensible orbital mechanics bullshit. She'd always assumed that the Cohort would teach her anything she absolutely had to know.

"What are we going to do about air?" Gideon asked in the smothering darkness. She clung to what she was almost certain was a spur of bone, considerately extruded for her benefit.

Whatever Harrow might have said was lost in Gideon's second yelp--this one not bitten down--as what was presumably the bone tentacles flung the shuttle at a staggering acceleration clear of the planet's gravitational well. Gideon's eyeballs slammed straight back into her brain. She would have critiqued Harrow's navigational technique if she'd been in any condition to make a sarcastic rejoinder.

Then, wonder of wonders, the shuttle's engine ignited, and the acceleration smoothed out. Gideon didn't realize she had spoken aloud until Harrow said, irritably, "Saying _whoosh_ won't make us go any faster."

"The orbital defenses--" Gideon said.

"We're going far and we're going fast," Harrow said. She yawned; Gideon heard the sound of her jaw cracking. "This is where I need you, Gideon."

"We can't go on the run forever," Gideon said, only now beginning to comprehend the magnitude of their crime. They were on the run from _God himself_ and all his necrosaints. They were _mega-doomed_. "Tell me you have a plan, my necromantic queen."

It said something about Harrow's state of mind that she didn't snap a retort at _my necromantic queen_. "I have a plan," she said, her voice echoing oddly in the confines of the shuttle.

"Yes, good, it's sharing time," Gideon said. She was momentarily distracted by the question of how the shuttle's environmental systems had so quickly wicked up the worst of the salt water. Now she was merely sitting in a muggy soup of humid air rather than soaking like prunes for an extremely salty fruitcake.

Cold, water-wrinkled fingers clasped Gideon's hand. Gideon did not ask how Harrow had located her so surely in the dark. After all, she was a true daughter of the Ninth, and besides that, Gideon's other hand was gripping bone, Harrow's element.

"There's a dead girl in the Locked Tomb," Harrow said. She told Gideon how she had crossed terrors and wonders, how she had witnessed the face of the Emperor's bane. "She's dead, but she may yet live. Else why would the Emperor our Lord fear her so?"

"If he thought locking her up was necessary," Gideon said, uneasy, "do you really think that--?"

"She is the secret beating heart of the Ninth," Harrow said, speaking slowly, as though in no little pain, "and she is the reason we exist at all. There's a purpose to her. She lies in her sleep unending, rather than being destroyed for all time. She may be an ally to our House yet, Gideon."

"So we're going home to the Ninth House," said Gideon, who would much preferred to have heard that they were going to be masticated by another bone construct.

Harrow's speech grew slower yet. Gideon realized, with a spike of alarm, that this wasn't her usual portentous bullshit. Rather, the effort of keeping the shuttle running, with so little thanergy to draw on, was taxing her.

"I need you now," Harrow said. This time there was slurring at the edges of her words.

"Don't you dare quit on me, you pussy," Gideon said. She reached out, drew Harrow into a completely unrehearsed embrace. It was as nice as it was embarrassing. "If you die without getting us out of here, I'll never forgive you."

"I didn't think," Harrow said, very distinctly, "forgiveness was in the cards anyway."

"One flesh, one end, bitch. We're the Ninth indivisible," Gideon said. "You need death-juice? I've got your death-juice right here. I died over and over in the Ninth House. I died each time Crux dragged me back. I died when the horrible aunts prayed their horrible prayers. I died practicing against Aiglamene. I died imagining you would say _one nice word_ to me, by accident, because that was the only way it would ever happen. I keep dying but that won't stop me coming back to haunt your pasty ass."

Harrow's breathing was very shallow now. "One flesh," she whispered into Gideon's ear, tickling the damp skin of her throat and _just coincidentally_ causing Gideon's pulse to jump, "one end." And she slipped inside Gideon's mind like a hand into a glove, suctioning out the thanenergy she needed to keep the shuttle running, and this time it hurt so sweetly that Gideon didn't want their journey ever to end.


End file.
